Have you ever thought, “If only I was a superhero I could…”

…Open a bag of cereal without it exploding all over the kitchen.

…Avoid having to do all these stupid jumping jacks and pushups to stay in shape.

…Have an entourage of sidekicks who’d back me up in any fight – be it a master villain or my boss

…Tell my best friend…

Last year at precisely this time I saw a piece of theatre that I fell utterly in love with: Punchkapow! by Team Sunshine Corporation.  It wasn’t just the humor, or the stunning fight choreography, or the tequila – like, cheap tequila – that made it exciting..  What knocked my socks off was the craft of it.  Without knowing what would happen in the play, I knew with perfect clarity that the ending would have the power to both devastate and uplift me. The best example I can give to illustrate what I mean by “craft” was my experience reading John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany for the first time at the age of fifteen.  For anyone who is familiar with Irving’s novels you know they are sublimely ridiculous and none more so than Owen Meany.  While reading it, I fell in love with the characters but didn’t understand why the narrator’s finger had to be cut off, or why the narrator and Owen practiced launching Owen into the air to slam dunk a basketball for hours every day, but I knew it was important – I could feel it.  And when the final, beautiful, tragic moment arrived everything came together; I saw how Irving had so carefully constructed the story to get to this moment, how this was the only possible ending for the book, and how everything that came before finally made sense in the nonsensical world Irving had created.

I got the same feeling as soon as the actors in Punchkapow! entered the stage.  This is a dude’s play…and a chick’s play.  It is surprising and laugh-out-loud funny.  I felt like I was hanging out with two of my best guy friends – you know, nice guys who are a little ridiculous because they spend hours pretending to be superheroes pretending to beat the snot out of each other…which is really fun to watch, actually. 

One of them has a secret.

I thought I knew the secret early on, but the actors and director so expertly danced around it that when I finally realized the secret was not at all what I’d assumed I felt, in a visceral way, the same shift in perspective that I experienced reading along as Owen Meany was launched into the air for his one, final heroic act.  For me, this is a play about friendship in the 21^st century, about the ways we reach for people we cannot touch and the ways we touch people we think we cannot reach.

It’s awesome to see to actors on stage who have so much fun and I can’t wait to share it with everyone here. Love to hear your thoughts! Let's chat on Facebook or email me..

Kacy   This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it